For Where Your Treasure Is, There Will Your Heart Be Also + 

The miser lay on his lonely bed; + 

Life’s candle was burning dim. + 

His heart in an iron chest was hid + 

Under heaps of gold and an iron lid; + 

And whether it were alive or dead + 

It never troubled him. + 

Slowly out of his body he crept. + 

He said, “I am just the same! + 

Only I want my heart in my breast; + 

I will go and fetch it out of my chest!” + 

Through the dark a darker shadow he leapt, + 

Saying “Hell is a fabled flame!” + 

He opened the lid. Oh, Hell’s own night! + 

His ghost-eyes saw no gold!⁠— + 

Empty and swept! Not a gleam was there! + 

In goes his hand, but the chest is bare! + 

Ghost-fingers, aha! have only might + 

To close, not to clasp and hold! + 

But his heart he saw, and he made a clutch + 

At the fungous puff-ball of sin: + 

Eaten with moths, and fretted with rust, + 

He grasped a handful of rotten dust, + 

And shrieked, as ghosts may, at the crumbling touch, + 

But hid it his breast within. + 

And some there are who see him sit + 

Under the church, apart, + 

Counting out coins and coins of gold + 

Heap by heap on the dank death-mould: + 

Alas poor ghost and his sore lack of wit⁠— + 

They breed in the dust of his heart! + 

Another miser has now his chest, + 

And it hoards wealth more and more; + 

Like ferrets his hands go in and out, + 

Burrowing, tossing the gold about⁠— + 

Nor heed the heart that, gone from his breast, + 

Is the cold heap’s bloodless core. + 

Now wherein differ old ghosts that sit + 

Counting ghost-coins all day + 

From the man who clings with spirit prone + 

To whatever can never be his own? + 

Who will leave the world with not one whit + 

But a heart all eaten away? + 